Nervousness settled in Rigel’s gut, and the hairs on his arms stood on end.

  There might not be anyone here—the equipment confirmed it, and even his instincts agreed. But he was certain they’d still find something… or something would find them.

  Another child’s skeleton, like the one those students had found recently? He didn’t know, but something was waiting. Maybe around that corner.

  End of the corridor.

  They turned left.

  Just another stretch of hallway, with pipes and air ducts lining the ceiling and doors on either side. No exits in sight, no undead, no student-killer.

  Still, undead or not, killer or not, someone had been here recently. Snow pointed at the floor, where footprints were faintly visible in the dust.

  Rigel pushed aside the ghosts in his mind and pressed on. How far had they traveled since entering? Two hundred feet? Six hundred? None of them was about to stop now because of the chance of running into someone. After all, they were armed, and their flashlights and helmet lights were still functional.

  In this section, the doors had small windows. Rigel tried to see through them, but the light reflected off the grimy glass, making it hard to distinguish anything inside.

  The window of one door was broken. Rigel leaned in to see what was inside, and—

  A head appeared in the darkness, making him jump. Someone was in there.

  No. Not someone.

  He shone his light on it and saw a pale, lifeless face staring back at him with a single dark, empty eye—a silent expression of abandonment.

  Even after realizing it was a Cyclops android, Rigel had to work to steady his breathing.

  He moved his flashlight around and spotted more androids, five or six of them, covered in dust and piled together like crash-test dummies abandoned in a car scrapyard. Two were old A60-R8 models, with their large vertical, oval-shaped visors. The others had rectangular visors, marking them as B11-R8s, the models that had replaced the A60s. Both types had been out of circulation for years.

  Behind them were rusted metal filing cabinets, some with drawers slightly open—one spilling what looked like rolled-up building blueprints. Cardboard boxes were stacked in a corner, their contents a mystery.

  “Anything?” Snow asked, stepping closer.

  “Looks like a storage room,” Rigel replied, just as a metallic clang echoed through the hallway, deafening in the enclosed space.

  Froia, distracted by trying to fix the sonar equipment, had accidentally kicked a piece of metal, sending it rolling across the floor.

  All three lowered their flashlights, aiming at the noise.

  At Froia’s feet lay a broken robotic body surrounded by shattered parts and a dark puddle that looked like blood: a pool of oil. The torso was a charred, human-shaped metallic shell, coated with a whitish layer of melted silicone. One arm was in pieces, while the other was twisted into a corkscrew shape, as if it had been wrenched off.

  The object Froia had kicked was the android’s head. Part of the chrome plate that made up its face was missing; the other part was cracked and partially detached from the skull, like a poorly fitted mask. Its visor—dead center in that exposed, circuit-filled cranium—was circular, though not as small as the ones on the newer D02s. It was likely a C14 model, more modern than the ones Rigel had just seen in the storage room.

  What stood out about this C14 was the caricatured handlebar mustache drawn beneath its visor in bold black marker.

  “Another Cyclops,” Froia remarked, pointing at the comical mustache. “At least his owner had a sense of humor. Tried to humanize him.”

  “There’s our culprit for the footprints,” Snow noted.

  Rigel noticed that, under the light, the oil splatters didn’t look dull—they gleamed. He stepped on one and dragged his boot, leaving a fresh streak on the floor. Using the tip of his boot, he prodded the melted silicone. It felt wet and sticky, confirming his suspicion.

  “He hasn’t been destroyed for more than a day or two,” he said, shining his flashlight. From that point on, there were two sets of footprints in the corridor: the ones they had been following, which led further ahead, and another set coming from up ahead that stopped just short of the android’s remains. “The Cyclops must have come from back there,” he deduced. “It probably passed through here, went a few more feet ahead, then came back and was taken down along the way.”

  “Destroyed by something—or someone—that left no footprints,” Snow added. “Maybe the same thing that killed those students.”

  Froia crouched by the android’s head, tilting it to inspect a small dark box mounted on his crown.

  “He’s equipped with a Four-Frequency transmitter,” he noted. Seeing that the sonar signal was still scrambled, he tried to piece together his theory. “These transmitters keep circuits from overloading, allowing complex electronic systems—like an android—to function in electromagnetically unstable areas. Which means… I think an EMB went off here—an electromagnetic burst, a big one—one that’s still causing interference. Whoever left this android here as a guard knew that.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Froia turned the Cyclops’ head again, exposing an undamaged switch on the unburned part of his neck.

  “Here’s his standard kill switch, untouched,” he said. “If they wanted him offline, they could’ve just flipped this damn switch instead of blowing him to pieces. Those bastards…”

  “Is that sentiment I hear in your voice, Froia?” Snow teased.

  “Well, you know I’m a sucker for machines,” Froia admitted. “I’ll have to settle for digging through their memory banks. Maybe I can recover something and see what this little fella has to tell us.”

  “License code?” Rigel asked.

  With his finger, Froia wiped away some of the soot from the back and revealed a small plaque attached next to the switch.

  “XXXX. Alfred,” he read. “Hah! A name with no code. I guess anyone operating here wouldn’t legally register their androids.”

  Following Alfred the Cyclops’s tracks, Rigel reached almost to the end of the hallway, stopping in front of a swinging door like the ones in hospital operating rooms. Its hinges had loosened, so the two panels didn’t quite close.

  On the wall across from it was a dull splatter mark, now dry, which instantly raised the Detective’s suspicions. He pressed the sole of his boot against the partially open door and, with a push, forced the laminated panels apart, jamming them to keep them from closing.

  The screech was deafening.

  The three officers held their breath until that now-familiar deathly silence returned.

  The room greeted them with a blast of hot air.

  The flashlights revealed what looked like it might have once been an operating room, a spacious one with a high ceiling.

  In the center stood an operating table—the only thing still intact—with IV stands and scattered medical monitoring equipment, all either broken or burned.

  But what caught their attention was something else. Scrap metal, walls, floor, ceiling—everything was stained with black splatters, like the furious brushstrokes of a frenzied artist. Rust? Burn marks?

  “Could the electromagnetic burst have started here?” Froia wondered aloud, his voice echoing.

  “I’d say it definitely looks like ground zero for one hell of a detonation,” Snow offered.

  Rigel was about to touch one of those black stains on the wall when his helmet lights revealed what it truly was. It wasn’t black; it was burgundy. And around them, stuck to the panels on the walls, were tiny fragments of…

  He peeled one off and examined it closely.

  “Don’t touch anything,” he ordered, stopping Froia just in time. “These aren’t burn marks; it’s blood.” He held up the fragment for the others to see. “Bone shards embedded in the walls.”

  Snow and Froia were stunned. They aimed their lights at the floor and saw torn clothes scattered everywhere, soaked in dried blood, along with formless lumps: the remains of those who once wore them.

  A group of people had exploded here… in the most literal sense.

  Despite the helmets protecting them from any possible stench, Froia instinctively brought his hand to his nose to try to shield it.

  “Proceed with caution,” he warned, just as nauseated by this sight as he’d been when he saw the students’ bodies earlier. “Look at these remains and compare them to those students. Maybe something in this place triggered an EMB so strong that… well, it kind of speaks for itself.”

  Rigel and Snow exchanged glances. It was true; whoever these people had been, they’d ended up far worse than the students in the cave. At least those kids were still recognizable as human, not just… things. And yet, the connection between the two forms of death was undeniable. Even so, the thought of fleeing in fear of something here that could blow them to pieces was far from their minds, especially since they were so close to finishing their inspection of the room.

  And as if fate were rewarding their courage, the beams of their flashlights landed on the jackpot: a massive machine at the far end of the room. An immense ivory-colored apparatus sat silently, as dead as everything else in that place.

  It was a complex of computer terminals and monitors of different sizes pointing in all directions, stacked one on top of another to reach the ceiling, connected by cables and steel pipes, with a massive control panel full of switches in the center, and long drums with pressure gauges and massive batteries on the sides.

  Rigel stared at it in slight awe; he had the impression he was standing before something more than just a bunch of equipment—it felt like a cybernetic, shapeless creature. Hell, even the monitors looked like a cluster of heads!

  There were no human remains on it, except for a few stains on the drums; being so far from the center of the room, where the explosion had apparently originated, had spared it from being covered in waste.

  “It looks like a monolith… or a massive electronic tumor,” Snow said, and his superior nodded; the second option sounded more accurate. “You think this could’ve triggered the blast? Maybe that’s why we didn’t find any trace of the students’ killer out there—because there wasn’t one.”

  Rigel tilted his head. “I can’t speak for these deaths,” he said, “but I highly doubt it’s connected to the students. The last kid—the one we found deeper in the woods—was executed exactly like the others. If this thing had discharged an electromagnetic pulse to kill them, we would’ve found birds and other animals torn to pieces along the way, too.”

  “Maybe a remote attack,” Snow suggested.

  But Rigel wasn’t convinced by that theory either. What would be the point of such an attack? It sounded like Bill Serrano’s story about a killer who came down from the sky with a grenade and flew back up after murdering the students.

  With his hand, the Detective brushed the dust off the old control panel and, going against his own caution, pressed a few buttons and switches just to confirm his suspicions. As he’d thought, nothing happened. The machine didn’t come to life. The screens were as dead as the transistors and capacitors inside them likely were.

  “No power’s run through here in a long time,” he said, tapping one of the machine’s long drums.

  Snow nodded. “Not surprising,” he said, shining his flashlight on the panel. “I recognize some of these parts, and I know they haven’t been manufactured in decades.” He turned to Froia. “What do you think? Is its main disk still intact?”

  Froia approached cautiously, as if afraid of waking the machine and ending up splattered across the walls.

  “Doubt it,” he replied.

  And while the officers debated the best way to study such a machine—whether to examine it on-site and in one piece or disassemble it and take it to an Army complex piece by piece—Rigel aimed his flashlight at a door, almost hidden behind the machine. A metal door, like those used for refrigeration rooms. It was ajar, casting shadows.

  He felt a cold chill run down the back of his neck.

  Fear? Rigel stopped for a moment. Was he actually feeling fear? Him, who’d seen hundreds of violent crimes, now afraid of the dark? He shook his head. His former fiancée used to say he had a strong will, stubborn as a bull—and with that on his side, fear couldn’t hurt him, right?

  He poked his head through the door. As the flashlight revealed what was inside, he gasped and let out a soft, “Damn…”

  Now, back home, the image of what he’d seen still lingered in his mind like a mirage.

  It took nearly two hours before he could fall asleep.